Random Things On Friday: With a PSA at the End!

January 6, 2012

I’m on the train right now, riding from NYC to DC, to hang out with my older sister and her family for the weekend. I’m on winter break from school, and have a little bit of free time, and found a cheap ticket to take advantage of. My sister and family were with my brother-in-law’s family for Christmas, so we missed hanging out (meaning she missed me and my younger sister singing John Denver & The Muppets Christmas songs to her). I’m looking forward to a weekend of playing with my adorable toddler nephew, and being in the ‘burbs once again. And of course I have a run planned—my sister lives wonderfully close to a small lake, with a dirt path around it. Every time I visit them, I have lofty plans to run it, but too often my plans get thwarted (see the time I sliced my fingers open with a broken microwave plate) and I miss out on my opportunity. I’m determined, though, to hit the trails tomorrow morning. I’ll keep you posted. I know you’ll be waiting with bated breath if I ran or not. I would be.

Two other things (totally not running related) that I thought I would share

So I have this hand lotion.

I bought it several years ago, and it lives on my desk at work. My hands get horribly dry and cracked during the winter, and I am constantly lotioning my hands. This particular lotion, however, smells very strongly of Fruit Loops. Yes—the cereal. When I first bought it, I thought it smelled oddly familiar, and one day it occurred to me that it smelled exactly like Fruit Loops. It’s kind of uncanny. The smell, though, is so strong that I’m scared I’m offending people when I put it on. Would you be offended if someone in your office was frequently using lotion that smelled of a sickeningly sweet breakfast cereal of your youth? In other words, should I toss it, and stick to more natural scents, or embrace my Toucan Sam-endorsed hand lotion?

And my other thing.

Monday night, around 2:30AM, I woke up to a beeping in the hallway of my apartment. It wasn’t constant—just a loud beep every 20 seconds or so. I thought it was probably the smoke detector alerting us that it needed new batteries. I came out of my room, and noticed it wasn’t the smoke detector…but the carbon monoxide detector! Cue panic rising in my body. Carbon monoxide: the silent killer! I immediately threw open every window in the apartment, and woke up my roommate (although she had started to wake up on her own from that annoying beeping). We couldn’t tell, however, if it was just malfunctioning, or was actually detecting CO, because the beeping wasn’t constant, still around every 20 seconds. We changed the batteries (reaching via text books on a step ladder—thanks grad school!): still beeping. We re-set the detector: still beeping. Throughout all of this, I was freaking the eff out. I was pretty sure we were slowly dying. We eventually decided we had to call 911, and had the fire department come to check it out. Two very attractive firemen came (helloooo, firemen. These are my pajamas. They are not cute. Nor am I at 3AM), and we told them what happened, and they pulled off the detector, looked at the back, and told us it had expired. There was no CO leak. We were just fine. And they told us this like we were really stupid and should have figured this out by ourselves. WTF firemen! First of all, who knew a CO detector has an expiration date. Second of all, we could barely reach it to change the batteries, let alone take it off the ceiling. And third, wouldn’t you prefer us being overly cautious when it comes to a CO leak, instead of just ignoring it? We felt kind of embarrassed, but also really responsible, which the firemen should have thought too. Whatever. Would you have done the same? You should…cause carbon monoxide is crazy scary! The take-home and PSA: Check your carbon monoxide detectors today, to make sure they are not expired, and write down when they do expire. Therefore you won’t die or look like an idiot to your local firemen.